Twin dragon trees (Dracaena draco), Breña Alta These trees stand in Breña Alta, just off the minor road which winds over the central ridge to El Paso. They grow so close together that it’s hard to tell where on trunk ends and the other begins. Of course there’s a legend associated with the trees. Two brothers lived nearby, and were very close, but they fell in love with the same…
A couple of weeks ago, I promised more photos of the Caldera de Taburiente. At the top of the Caldera there’s a rock formation that from one angle looks distinctly like Napoleon Bonepart, or an indian. So it’s called Boniface or El Indio. This photo is taken from below the Roque de las Viñas, beside the vineyard. The best viewpoint has a lethal drop and no guard rail. It’s totally…
Most people say La Palma is the most beautiful of the Canary Islands. And practically everybody agrees that the most beautiful part of La Palma is the Caldera de Taburiente. In 1825, the German geologist Leopold von Buch studied the Caldera de Taburiente and concluded that the crater was formed by the emptying of a magma chamber below. He was sufficiently impressed with it that he gave the name “caldera”…
This is a traditional recipe for Carnival in the Canary Islands. A literal translation would be “honey soup” but as you can see, this isn’t soup. It can be rather soggy, though. I believe in some places they use honey, but on La Palma, it’s always “miel de cana”, which is like black treacle or molasses, but a little runnier. Ingredients Molasses (one small jar) 1 tsp cinnamon anis 1…
You may remember the fuss in 2001 when two geologists, Steven Ward and Simon Day, announced their theory that the west side of the island of La Palma would collapse one day, creating a mega-tsunami that would cross the entire Atlantic and still be anything up to 25 metres high when it hit New York, and indeed everything from Newfoundland in Canada to Recife in Brazil. These days, almost all…
M100 (NGC 4321), a barred galaxy in the Virgo cluster There’s a really simple reason why the Royal Greenwich Observatory moved their telescopes here. It’s one of the three best places in the world for astronomy. A modern telescope could see the equivalent of a candle on the moon, so obviously they want to be well away from city lights. Even more obviously, they want to be somewhere that doesn’t…